History tells us Starmer will face more campaign scares

Former home secretary Jack Straw reflects on a tough week for the Labour leader’s bid to be the next prime minister

“You never ever felt like that,” was my wife’s response when I told her that I had been asked to write about how it feels to fight an election when you think you are going to win. The 1997 general election was the sixth I’d fought as a candidate. Yes, Labour has beaten the Tories occasionally. In 1964, only just. For months we’d been ahead in the polls but they narrowed and narrowed. On the day we had just a one-seat margin over all other parties.

In February 1974 (when I was Labour candidate for that socialist redoubt of Tonbridge and Malling) Tory PM Ted Heath had had a seven-point lead when he called the election. It ended in a dead heat. The Tories polled more votes than us but were four seats down. Harold Wilson formed a minority administration to scrape a majority in October. That time we had 42 more seats than the Tories but only two seats ahead of all other parties.

In the five years to 1979 we gradually lost our majority, stumbling to defeat against Margaret Thatcher. That was when I was first elected as MP for Blackburn. There followed endless false dawns of local elections, some truly horrible internal battles, and the 1992 general election.

Mythology has it that it was the 1992 Sheffield rally that cost us and Neil Kinnock the election. That rally was weird. When I was introduced as the “next education secretary” I recall thinking that we’d all be punished for this hubris. The truth was that support dripped away from us throughout the election – aided by a vitriolic media campaign against us. The last opinion poll gave Labour a 3 per cent lead. The result the next day was a Tory lead of 7.5 per cent and a majority Conservative government for the fourth time in a row.